


Bloody Valentine

by polyphenols



Category: Psycho-Pass
Genre: Implied/Referenced Character Death, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Melancholy, Threats of Violence, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2014-09-05
Packaged: 2018-02-16 05:13:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2257122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polyphenols/pseuds/polyphenols
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The lives, literary discussions, and love triangles(?) of three criminal minds, before and after Touma's capture and re-emergence. Written in February 2013.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Act I

**Author's Note:**

> Act I was written directly after episode 17 was pre-screened, and Act II and III shortly after it officially aired. The prequel novel, Monster Without a Name, was not released at the time, so that version of Touma's backstory was not consulted for this fic.

_Under the spreading chestnut tree_  
I sold you and you sold me.  
There lie they, and here lie we  
Under the spreading chestnut tree.

\--George Orwell, _1984_

 

 

 

**Act I**

 

Choe Gu-Sung’s first impression of Touma Kouzaburou: the boy is a walking void with a sweet smile pasted on. Molasses and arsenic.

Touma Kouzaburou’s first impression of Choe Gu-Sung: he does not speak much, when the three of them are talking the business of death. Choe has this way of constantly standing behind Makishima Shogo, as if trying hard to be his shadow.

 

.

 

In the middle of winter they go to dinner together. Makishima gets these whims sometimes, and Choe humors them because Makishima believes spontaneity is part of the glory of the human soul, and because Choe finds it rather endearing. _Sir, do you really have to write a thesis to justify the fact that you want ice cream in December?_ But of course he would never actually say that.

This time they end up going to a Korean restaurant, ostensibly because Makishima has not been there before, but Choe suspects it is meant to be some kind of gesture of camaraderie toward him. He does not volunteer to tell Makishima that he really has no fondness for the cuisine of his home country. It is a remarkably cold day, and Makishima wears a white coat with a faux fur lining, the fluffy immensity of which makes him look like a small and sleepy animal. Touma wears a black silk vest over a deep red shirt; he says he is not afraid of the cold. “But you, you can’t survive without those puffy jackets, can you,” he adds, and leans over to jab Choe in the ribs.

There had been exactly one time when Makishima had put on one of said puffy jackets by mistake. They had both been in a hurry, and no one had turned on the lights. Choe’s smile widens by a millimeter at the recollection. Touma’s mind is elsewhere while they wait to be seated; jabbing at a menu, he is talking excitedly about how they should kill all the politicians. That is part of the privilege of being an exception: you can talk about anything you want, in public, without doing the slightest damage to your hue. Touma’s hue is not pure white but a very faint pink; it is something he does not like having discussed. _Oso-colored_ , Makishima had once joked, for the name of Oso Academy means cherry-blossom frost. _Do you not think_ , Choe had replied, _that for a joke, it verges on the poetic too much?_

Appetizers are served first. They are more like side dishes, _banchan_ , Choe says. Makishima looks at the items with academic familiarity, names them all in the original language, his pronunciation only slightly off. Choe thinks back, briefly, to that unspeakable week when Makishima had tried to address him entirely in Korean, and he had nearly killed himself laughing. “Why are so many of these red?” Touma asks, peering cautiously from the other side of the table.

It seems amusing, Makishima says, that a teacher from a prestigious academy would be a picky eater himself. Touma draws in a deep breath and starts working on the kimchi. Choe soon thinks that he can see tears in his eyes. “It’s very good,” he gasps, when Makishima asks him how he likes the food.

“Not saying what you mean,” Makishima replies with a faultlessly delighted smile, “is the first step to losing the radiance of your soul.”

“It’s very good as an implement of torture, then,” Touma says defiantly, and wipes his eyes on a napkin. Makishima closes his eyes as if satisfied by the answer, and takes a long sip of tea. They have ordered _soon tofu_ , and the bubbling pots are served with raw eggs to crack into them. Touma’s eyes widen slightly in horror at this. Choe thinks he knows the reason; he has often hacked into the servers of Oso Academy to examine the schoolwide announcements for any signs of alarm. No one is onto them so far, but just this morning, there had been a broadcast warning of the dangers of salmonella contamination in uncooked eggs. “One in 20,000,” Choe says, casually, as if he could be referring to anything.

Touma Kouzaburou and Makishima Shogo are each one in 2,000,000. The young schoolteacher glances around at his dining companions with the tragic air of having been betrayed, and then grimaces and cracks the egg into his food.

“Are you enjoying it so far?” Makishima asks. Choe realizes the question is for him; Touma is now eating with the great concentration of someone convinced of his imminent demise. “Why, naturally,” he replies.

“I find it quite interesting you haven’t made any of this at home,” Makishima adds. “When you seem so talented at preparing every other type of cuisine.”

_Sir, should you really be saying that in public?_ The thought crosses his mind. “I do not like to remind myself of past lives,” he says instead. It is true, and closer to what he has wanted to say.

“Surely there was something during those years worth remembering as well.”

“Nothing that does not pale in comparison to the present.”

Under the table Makishima’s hand brushes against his. Later he will fall asleep on the couch while reading, Choe thinks, as surely as if he has already seen the future. Perhaps he will still be wearing that ridiculously fluffy jacket; if not, Choe will have to lay a blanket on him. Outside the window a light snow has begun to fall. He glances toward it briefly, and then Touma, who has not looked up from his tofu for a moment, quickly and deliberately steps on his foot.  
  
 

.

 

The chemicals used for plastination have a vaguely alarming smell, some faint whisper of inorganic death. Touma does not mind, because as the photography instructor at Oso Academy he is familiar with the various scents of darkroom solutions. The names of the chemicals themselves are evocative: developer, stop bath, fixer. As if time could truly be suspended, the living transformed and preserved into something more enduring, more _complete_.

So he likes it. Touma Kouzaburou likes the entire process: the frenzied yet meticulous planning, the acquisition of the materials, the blood-and-sweat work (his sweat, their blood) of sculpting them to his ideal of hilarity, the sublime moment of molecular transformation, the furtive act of transportation, the grand reveal. The part that he does not like is Choe Gu-Sung coming over to the storehouse underneath Oso Academy to deliver the chemicals. Makishima, he thinks, has no reason for not coming himself. Makishima seems to have appreciation enough for these lost subterranean spaces of their city. _Unspace_ , Makishima had called these places once, with his usual cypher of a smile. _And we, I suppose we are the Unspace Exploration Committee now._ A reference to a novel that has fallen into obscurity, Choe would explain to Touma later.

_He has chosen me_ , Touma would think, but not speak aloud. _You should understand that I am not someone who would require an explanation._

But Choe likes to talk, which is not something Touma had imagined of him, upon their first meeting. When he delivers the chemicals he always lounges around for a while with an untroubled air, chit-chatting. Touma can think of no other word for it. He talks about Makishima the way that his students talk amongst themselves in giggling whispers about the daily habits of people they have fallen in love with. Just because Choe sounds so nonchalant about it does not make it fundamentally any different.

“How long have you been with him?” Touma finally asks, in the middle of reattaching a twisted limb, because he cannot listen to Choe go on about Makishima’s appraisal on the respective virtues of orange pekoe and lapsang souchong any longer.

“Seven years, more or less.” Choe is leaning against a railing, eyes seemingly closed, relaxed and half-smiling. Touma does not consider this a particularly disarming pose. He has owned cats before.

“Aren’t you afraid—” he wipes sweat away from his brow and ends up with an extra smudge of blood there. “After seeing what befalls so many of his so-called friends, aren’t you worried that you’ll disappoint him?”

“I’ve known Mr. Makishima for seven years,” Choe repeats, as if that is an answer. And it is.

“A good attitude,” Touma says, too loud. “I’m not afraid. Shogo and I, we’re the same kind. We’re _exceptions_. This world was made to be our playground. I can no more disappoint him than he can disappoint himself.”

“You don’t have to think about it in _those_ terms,” Choe says. There is always an undercurrent of laughter in Choe’s voice, easy and natural and the farthest thing from smug. Touma does not like this either; he wishes he could at least call it smug. “If Mr. Makishima needs you, you need not fear disappointing him.”

“And how will you know? That he needs you?”

“If he forgives you for your disappointments.”

“Hell of a way to find out for sure, isn’t it? Kind of a Catch-22.”

Choe opens his eyes a little at that, as if in mock surprise. _Of fucking course I’ve read Catch-22_ , Touma thinks. The red cybernetic glow appraises him for a moment, and then Choe’s features meld effortlessly back into a smile. “I’ll be going now,” he says. “Don’t wear yourself out, you have lecture tomorrow, don’t you?”

The next corpse is found under a holographic advertisement for laspang souchong tea. Teacup in one hand, pinky extended delicately, and dressed in an absurdly poofy jacket in the middle of summer. Choe does not linger around the storeroom after delivering the chemicals any longer. He says—this man, who has been trained across the sea in dozens of ways to kill—Choe Gu-sung says he does not like the sight of blood.

 

.

 

“He is—a friend. Not a tool or a toy. I mock him sometimes, because he is terribly young, and it is a disservice to someone still in his salad days to not be told that he has green in his face. But I will admit it, I’m fond of him. Eventually, perhaps when we require it to happen, he will be of a level to become my equal.”

“He is dangerous, sir.”

“You and I are dangerous. It is my hope that one day he will get there.”

 

 

 

( _Sir, will you understand—it is not myself I am concerned for.)_

 

.

 

They have been talking more of late, which pleases Touma. Wide-ranging, enlightening conversation. About books, of course, and other topics: what is Sibyl, really? What is human nature? What can be done to fix this world? It is all very invigorating talk, and Touma feels more alive for it every time, but then there is that part of him that wonders: can we talk about something more mundane for once? How does he do it, how does that foreigner do it, does he wear an apron around the house while you two pick out pastries for your afternoon tea? Does he comb through your hair?

There is one time when he begins, awkwardly almost, to talk about the weather, which is one of the few things Sibyl cannot control. For an instant Makishima looks bored. Touma has seen that look before, and it is one that has preceded the death, usually, of whoever precipitated it. Now that it has been directed at him, he does not feel afraid. Instead anger blossoms through him clear and bright, followed by a kind of reckless exhilaration. “Do you know,” he says, “how I will do the next one?”

“Oh? I do not. Please elaborate.” Curiosity settling back into Makishima’s eyes. They are an uncommon color, liquid gold. Why, as another one in two million, is Touma not blessed with uncommon looks? “I’ve been thinking,” he says. “Of what kind of person to pick this time. A newscaster, maybe, the kind who only repeats what they’ve been told to say. They’ll be hidden under a holoscreen of their own programme, the world going on obliviously without them. They won’t need eyes or ears, not the way they’ve lived, and there’ll be a megaphone growing out of their mouth—oh, people will get the point. But even that bores me. I _understand_ , Shogo, what it’s like to be bored. Maybe,” he walks closer, “the next one will be a man who has been chronically bored. He despairs so of this life, you know, I really think I should do something for him.”

 

( _What I am afraid of_ —why had Choe said that, in a moment of weakness? Hadn’t he known better than to tell him? _What I am afraid of is that Mr. Makishima is too fascinated by revealing the truth of things, whether in a person or a system. He will peel away all the layers until the terrible that lies underneath is plain to see. He does not contemplate what it can do to him. No, maybe he does—maybe he finds the peril a part of the appeal.)_

 

“And what,” Makishima says, fixing him with his gaze, “do you imagine you will do?”

Touma tells him. It is more detailed, more _creative_ an end, than he had thought himself capable of devising. Makishima laughs, a sound positively musical. There is wine on the kitchen counter, half a bottle, opened. Makishima does not drink, Touma remembers. Makishima pours a glass of wine, too full, didn’t Choe ever teach you how to properly serve wine? The liquid is viscous and red as blood, and Makishima takes Touma by the shoulders and sits him gently but firmly down on the couch, puts the cool brim of the cup to his lips.

“What are you reading now?” he remembers asking, later, sometime between day and night.

“Rereading, really. The importance of revisiting an old favorite is often lost upon people nowadays. Orwell’s _1984_ , for instance, never fails to surprise me every time I read it. I could lend it to you, if you would like.”

“I would. Please.” A too-eager nod. He is not the teacher but the student here, young and ridiculous, turning over the red-covered book pressed into his hands as if it is something more precious than all the treasures in the world. That he has even fantasized about bringing Makishima down seems impossible now. But hold on to that fantasy, Touma tells himself. It is the only protection you may have. Put in these terms, he has distanced that moment of madness from himself, the immediacy and ecstasy of it from ever possibly becoming real.

“Please do be careful,” Makishima says, a hand snaking around the back of his neck, ruffling his hair. “Take care not to bend the pages.”

“Why, does Choe do that?”

“I don’t lend him books. He uses an e-reader.” A faint smile of tolerant condescension.

“You haven’t tried to talk him out of it?”

“I forgive him these little disappointments.”

Touma thinks to say something, some little _ah-ha, so that’s how it is_ , but does not. “I will return this book as soon as I am able,” he says finally.

“Oh, no, take your time with it. I would hate to hurry your reading. You can give it back only when you are ready. Just don’t forget.” Makishima’s smile is gentle, harmlessly catlike, and Touma thinks, I will read this from cover to cover, I will analyze every word, and I will not be any closer to knowing, you will not be a line on my page. He thinks, I would like to crack open your head and look inside. I would like to have all the time in the world to figure you out, to keep anyone else from figuring you out. You and I, we’re the kind who are going to die terribly one day, in ways we cannot predict, and that’s just too bad, when the only way I can come to understand you is for us both to live forever.

“I promise,” he finally says. “I will return this to you, no matter what.”


	2. Act II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Choe's backstory references the official novel by Takami, which may differ from other works.

**Act II**

 

 

Touma Kouzaburou does not expect to get caught, which he knows is hypocritical, given his belief that something terrible will happen to him one day, him and Makishima both. They are simply the sort of people to whom terrible things happen. But getting caught by the MWPSB is not among the possibilities that run through his mind when he waits for his students to arrive in the classroom, for stoplights to turn green, for himself to fall asleep at night when the book is under his pillow. Not on the list of fates he imagines others have imagined for him, in between their screams. As an end to his story, mere capture is too flat and banal, the sort of bloodless, defeatist ending he has always hated seeing. _1984_ has that kind of ending; he reads it twice, lying on his side in bed, staring at the page for a while until he feels his features crawling into a smile.

“You should be more careful,” Makishima says to him. This is shortly after he has killed that Enforcer, Sasayama something-or-other, a jumpy hedonist of a man who Makishima nonetheless had found interesting. Touma hates that word, _interesting_ , hates especially the way his partner in crime says it like a mantra. It is aseptic and undescriptive. It is the very opposite of what it means to convey. And it is just so easy to hate the way Makishima hides behind his doctrine of the interesting, as if he has found some entirely objective way of painting his own whims and desires as the greater good. The plastinated corpse of Sasayama is not Touma’s best work, but there is a difference between art that is functional and that which is decorative. He is still pleased with it.

“I don’t need to be careful,” he replies with a jovial smile. “What can they possibly do to me?”

“It is the unknown that you should be afraid of.”

But they are neither of them familiar with fear, and when Makishima warns others about some danger, he always does so with just a bit of a smile, a brightness to those yellow eyes that makes the risk itself more appealing. Touma doesn’t mind the feeling of falling headfirst this induces in him. He pours himself a glass of tomato juice, freshly blended, very pulpy and red. _I should call you Toumato, for how much you drink that stuff_ , Makishima had told him once, and he had laughed and then felt miserable about it. This is the sort of low-grade sit-com humor that is the privilege of other people to enjoy, the people in the streets who have to worry about their hues and crime coefficients. But it is also the kind of joke Makishima and Choe make when no one else is around, when they are finishing up their pretentious tea of the week or picking out shirts in vaguely offensive colors. _So you want to live in both worlds?_ Touma wants to ask him. _So your standard of the interesting doesn’t apply to yourself or your friend there?_ There have been times in the past when Makishima seemed like a god to him, but gods, after all, are the original hypocrites.

“But the unknown can hardly compare to the knowledge we already have to live with. I can’t imagine a worse fate than being splattered by a Dominator,” he says, swirling the tomato juice around violently in his glass. “There’s no artistry in it. You and I don’t have to worry about these things, but I wonder about Choe Gu-Sung. Does it keep him up at night?”

“Touma Kouzaburou,” Makishima says, with a quiet forcefulness, a glare forty degrees below zero, and Touma thinks that this is also a victory, this at least is a reaction. “I’m just saying you should do a better job of covering your tracks. Or else you might wish Dominators worked on you, when they catch you.”

It’s a while, at least, before they do. On the day the doors fly open behind him he has blood on his face, on his newly ironed Oso Academy teacher’s uniform, and he holds up the scalpel in his hand and gives the girls from Division 2 a winning smile. He is curiously unafraid. For a long time after that, the fact that he has been caught does not seem real.

“About the book you lent me,” he’d said to Makishima, the week before. “The ending disappoints me. The way Winston and Julia sold each other out after they were arrested, just like that.” And then the utter deadness and dispassion between them, upon their reunion: no resentment or even regret. _I betrayed you. And I betrayed you_. The monotone of the song playing in the background. Touma could almost hear it, the first time he read the scene: _Under the spreading chestnut tree…_

“The human will is a very feeble thing when confronted with its worst fears.” Makishima’s demeanor had thawed out a little, since that other time, when Touma had come so triumphantly close to bringing real anger out of him. Now he had retreated back into his own thoughts with all the languor of a particularly silky-furred white cat, and Touma thought he would never break through again, never touch the fire underneath the ice. “Any successful autocrat understands this.”

“And that’s what you say we’re fighting, huh? You and your lofty words. But really, Shogo. If it was us in their place, if we were Winston and Julia, and the door has just shut between us. Do you think we would do any better?”

Makishima had looked at him fondly, he thought, as if for once looking at something he was unwilling to lose. Just a trick of the light, he told himself, just an illusion refracted from that perfectly rendered hypocrite’s face. “Let us not find out.”

Now is the time for finding out. In the back of the police van Touma thinks this, with a touch of hilarity. The red-covered book is in his coat pocket. He will ask that they not take it away from him, later, that they at least keep it somewhere safe, from where it might eventually be retrieved. He will ask a good number of questions, none of which will be answered. And he will wait. In the white glare of the isolation cell, in hallways and interrogation rooms, through days and nights indistinguishable he will wait, and it will occur to him that he has believed all along in the impossible. That when they caught him, he had imagined that Makishima would come to free him, because there was nothing that should have been beyond Makishima’s means to do.

 _If you’d known_ —in the middle of the third or the thirtieth night of blankness he says this aloud to the walls, laughing. _If you’d known I still had the book with me, maybe then you would have come for me, huh?_ Later in the night he dreams of Makishima walking down the hall toward him, a slender stroke of white glowing under the fluorescent lights, approaching and then unlocking the door to his cell. A hand slips under his pillow, takes out the red book, strokes his face. Then Makishima retreats into the hall and locks the door, walks away with steady echoing footsteps without ever turning back.

 

.

 

“Is this really okay?”

This is, by now, the fifth or sixth time Choe Gu-Sung has gone through the motions, these pretenses of sympathy and concern. Maybe he really is concerned; he no longer can tell himself. For his part Makishima will never say what he means. But every time, every time one of their accomplices or collaborators falls to some unsavory fate, Choe will stand with his hands behind his back, and ask in an untroubled voice, _is this really okay? You were fond of that person, weren’t you?_

Usually Makishima will brush it off, explain casually how the hapless soul has disappointed him. But Touma Kouzaburou has not existed for long enough, in their mutual lives, to be a disappointment. It is a warm afternoon, the scenery outside the windows so lovely that there is no need at all to turn on the holograms. Makishima studies him for a moment, the sunlight forming a sort of fuzzy halo around his hair, and finally says, “At least it wasn’t you.”

Choe relaxes a little, where he stands. “You shouldn’t need to worry about me.”

Makishima throws something at him, a swift blur of a motion, and he catches it effortlessly. When he examines the object in his hand, a brief look of puzzlement crosses his face, but Choe has been with Makishima for long enough not to question why he has just thrown a crocheted tea cozy at him, or why he has a crocheted tea cozy in the first place. “Just testing your reflexes,” Makishima says, smiling now, looking as playful and guileless as a child.

“It is good to see you are so enthusiastic, sir.”

“And it is good to see the years have not made you any less sharp.”

It does not seem like years, not really, since that first meeting too dramatic to be retold without a faint touch of self-consciousness. It had been raining—and was it not always raining, in these stories? Slanted rain and neon lights, him not sure whether to mourn a country that had just gone to pieces or celebrate the fact that it was finally, finally lifted from his life, a drink in his hand as he meandered down some unfamiliar alleyway. He had been wearing the face of someone else. No one could encode a more perfect holographic disguise, and that night Choe had not felt much like letting anyone see his real face. But then this familiar-looking stranger, this specter in white without an umbrella had approached him, and they had assessed each other in milliseconds and found the other dangerous. A few exchanged blows all landing on air, neither of them faster than the other but the hologram gone, his opponent raising an eyebrow and half-smiling when it disappeared. Choe was still looking for an opening when Makishima put an arm around his shoulders and said, _I find that tea helps clear the mind much more than alcohol, if there is something you want to talk about._

So really he does not know how this all happened, how the sky became pale with the approaching dawn when they were not yet halfway done with talking, how he had learned to make tiramisu and crème brulee, and Makishima had learned to wear colors other than white. Why not work with him? Choe asked himself. There was, he realized, nothing else left for him to want to do.

He said this soon after they had gotten to know each other, all sincerity, perhaps even kneeling, but then he became aware there was a part of himself removed from it, a part that had been trained in duplicity, in becoming someone else. Makishima knew this. When he had come to this country with a code name and a mission, he had been told to find out the secrets that made this perfectly hideous utopia run, and even now he wanted to know, out of his own curiosity. This set him apart, he knew; curiosity was an empirically pure thing, something that protected him from ever being another casualty, another case of being eulogized by nothing more than _is this really okay_. But then it turned out Makishima was the one who felt a lack of safety.

“Would you think of leaving this country?” Makishima had asked him once, on some unbearably hot summer’s day with the AC turned to near freezing and Antarctic landscapes superimposed on all the windows. “If you discovered the answers to all your questions, all that you ever wanted to know.”

Shocking, that he could even contemplate it, could look like a somewhat anxious kitten while asking. “But I will never,” Choe replied, “finish figuring out this one particular puzzle.” It was more than he had meant to say, but so what? Falling was a simple action, and they had always said, between them, there was never any need to conceal what they meant. “I have been all over the world, but now I am— _somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience_.”

“You are quoting poetry at me, Choe Gu-Sung?” Makishima’s features relaxed, as if the previous moment of almost fearful seriousness had never been visited upon his face. “I did not think you would have also read Cummings.”

For all his erudition, Choe had thought, Makishima did need to work on his pronunciation of English names.

 

 

 

That is all long ago. The memory brushes up against him like an insect’s wing, somehow disturbing in the afternoon light. Choe puts away the tea cozy, brings Makishima a plate of macarons while he sits reading. Of course they will not be caught, he thinks, of course they will not suffer the same fate as Touma or all of the others. They will stand just above the tideline, the horizon stretching on endlessly before them. Makishima turns a brittle page with care; it is translucent, during the moment of its transit, in a beam of sunlight. _In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me; or which I cannot touch because they are too near_. Choe takes a step back, remembers or tries not to remember the look on Makishima’s face, the moment he had asked, _would you think of leaving?_ As if he had become momentarily less than himself, momentarily unmoored.

Choe is not vain enough to believe that is a look he will wear for long, even if the worst should come to pass. That he is not inextricable from the life that is Makishima Shogo, in spite of how neatly he has woven himself into every detail of the temporary safety of their shared existence, every banal and household little thing they have touched. Makishima is deeply absorbed in his reading now, and Choe leans forward and brushes back one of those illogical strands of silver hair that has fallen in front of his face. Makishima does not seem to take notice. “What we have agreed to do, do not let me mean more than that,” he says, and when Makishima does not react, he assumes that he has not noticed that, either.

 

.

 

He does not know how long it has been since his capture. When he opens his eyes he finds Kasei Joushu, the Chief of Police, standing before him, and Touma has not the slightest sense of premonition that this is a face he will get used to seeing in more ways than one.

“We will make an offer,” she says.

“What could you possibly have that I want?” he asks. “What, in this lifeless system of yours, is actually worth having?” He is not an idealist, not a social critic or political commentator. His works have given the impression that he is, sometimes, but Touma is well aware of just how much he can throw away, and for what. But now, he thinks, it will not matter. In a moment he believes she will draw a gun out of her coat and put it to his head, this relentless-looking little woman who seems made of steel and fiber optic glass. Makishima will find out, because Makishima finds out everything. He will let Makishima believe that he died for an ideal. “All I want is freedom,” he says. “The freedom to live, and the freedom to die.” It sounds cheap and hackneyed when he says it, and really he does not mean it at all, but there, he thinks, now there’s more than one kind of ending to your favorite story.

“We cannot offer you freedom,” she says, “but everything else. Power. Knowledge. Eternity, in a way. And revenge.”

And when she explains, fully, he wonders how he could have ever wanted anything else.


	3. Act III

**Act III**

 

 

 

All reunions are beautiful, Touma Kouzaburou thinks to himself.

Three years is not a long time. It takes him only a few days to get used to what he has become, a voice in the buzz of the consortium, deciding with such elegant impunity the fate of nearly everyone in their world. It is the closest he thinks a human being can get to divinity. _But of course_ —he remembers what he used to believe, years and years ago— _gods are the original hypocrites_. To which he now adds: _there is nothing wrong with that, since no one is there to reproach you._

So it is for the protection of the masses and the enhancement of Sibyl’s functionality, supposedly, that an undue amount of resources are poured into the identification and capture of Makishima Shogo. For a long time the tracks are cold. Then comes an incident at Oso Academy, a student he does not recognize dancing across his old haunts, a mere imposter who has the audacity to make poor copies of his work. To imagine that it is being done with Makishima’s blessing fills him with an indignant sense of disgust. A few weeks later there is a firefight in the dead space beneath the city, the _unspace_ that had once been their playground. Through the Dominator’s sights he recognizes the old man he had met once or twice in Makishima’s company, who had once chuckled and cautioned Touma against ending up as one of his pipes.

As part of the consortium Touma is perfectly objective. He lends his abilities in order for Sibyl to arrive at a conclusion, nothing more. There is no touch of the personal, no, when he extrapolates the crime coefficients of those two as high as can be reasonably believed with the current algorithms. There is no reason to believe he feels a flicker of triumph when the Dominator locks on to them. When the Enforcer blasts Senguji Toyohisa to pieces, Touma thinks that if he were still in possession of a physical body, he would lean forward into his hands and laugh and laugh.

Because it is laughable, he realizes, to finally be able to see inside someone else’s head. See how little they add up to. What are they, these two pretenders, compared to him? He is incomprehensible. Only two incomprehensible creatures can understand each other. He does not understand Makishima, when he is finally able to scan him in one long nervous timeless moment, but that does not matter, that will not matter, when soon they will be linked to one another, know one another more utterly than any two people ever have. It will be soon. He promises himself this, for the new year. It is absurd to think that Makishima can elude capture for much longer, not against him as he is now. _See where all your book learning has gotten you now, Shogo?_ Touma realizes that he is not even angry at what had been, all those years ago, something too tepid to be interpreted as desertion and betrayal. Makishima is woefully outmatched now, enough to even inspire pity in him, so limited and small. _For now, until we make you into something better, until I welcome you home_. And how long can he keep running, now that they have all but cut off his legs? All those followers Makishima has collected over the years, all the people who would have any reason to assist and protect him. He has taken them out, one by one, until there is just one more. And then none.

On that day he rehearses the words in silence, even though the consortium has cautioned him against saying anything unduly personal, anything that would damage Sibyl’s image. On that day he takes with him just one superfluous thing. It has cost a great deal, but misuse of government funds is by now the most minor of his sins.

_What I want most to say is, see, all this time—I didn’t keep anything, not a single other possession, not even myself. Because what right did I have to myself, if you hadn’t thought it worthwhile to fight to keep me?_

_But the one thing you have entrusted me with, I have tried to keep that safe, as best as I could._ Touma frowns a little when he picks up the book and begins wrapping it meticulously, the brown paper crinkling too loud. Certain members of the consortium have suggested gift wrap and ribbons, and he is never sure when they are being serious. But for now their voices are quiet in his head, and he thinks that he can manage to do this.

The book is weightier in his hands than he recalls. Perhaps Makishima will be able to tell that it is not the same copy, if Makishima has cared to remember at all. The signs of wear are different, the fading of the leather cover, the slow aging of the paper. But it should not matter, Touma thinks to himself furiously, folds the paper over the corners, keeps his face turned away from anything that could act as a mirror. It should not matter if the cover is different, the binding and the pages, everything down to the goddamned atomic level. If should not matter as long as the words inside are the same.

 

.

 

The night before the breaching of Nona Tower, Choe Gu-Sung returns to the house to find Makishima Shogo pouring two glasses of champagne. “I did not think you were fond of drinking, Mr. Makishima,” he says. But with them there are always firsts.

Makishima looks up at him, eager and comically expectant in a way he has not anticipated. “I thought this would be an occasion worth commemorating.”

There is death on the streets; there is fire reflected on the broken glass of windows, there are locks and barricades on all the doors. It is a canvas they have painted, and Makishima has floated through it all like a ghost, the starched whiteness of his clothing never stained by the slightest speck of blood. Choe does not believe that he has become inured to the idea of right and wrong. Ever since he met Makishima, his notions of right and wrong have simply been redefined.

“Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to celebrate after we’re done?” he asks. “After we have seen what we wanted to see.”

“Suppose it turns out to be a disappointment?” Makishima asks him, lips upturned with just the slightest devious edge.

“The truth shall never be a disappointment to its seekers. Unless one was never after the truth in the first place.”

“You’ve become philosophical, Choe. Perhaps I’ve been a bad influence.” Makishima chuckles, flashes him a quick delighted smile. “Come sit down, I’ve opened the bottle already and it’ll go to waste otherwise.” Choe notices there is a fresh dent on the wall where a cork might have struck with ungodly force. He will have to paint that over later; neither of them believe much in indoor holograms. With an obliging sigh he sits down across the table. “A toast,” Makishima says, and they raise their glasses.

“To victory?” he asks. “To truth?”

“To living in ordinary ways,” Makishima replies.

“Do you really believe that, sir?”

Makishima lays a hand on his, flat on the table. “To survival,” he adds.

The champagne is of very good quality, subtle and delicate and cool. Makishima is not used to drinking, and a light flush appears over his face after he has finished the glass. _What have I done with him all this time?_ Choe thinks to himself, wanting to laugh. _How is it that he has lived with the owner of a bar without having more than three glasses of alcohol in ten years?_ “That is probably sufficient, sir,” he says. “You should not like to be hung over tomorrow.”

“By then we shall be drunk on the purely conceptual,” Makishima says, waving a hand in the air. He is giddy with himself, Choe thinks with amused exasperation. It is a state he will have to find the opportunity to observe more often.

“Perhaps it is time you had some rest,” he suggests. “I will clean up here.” He helps Makishima up from his seat, and quite unexpectedly Makishima dances him across the kitchen in some bastardization of tango and waltz. “Sir,” he says. His cell phone is in danger of falling out of his coat pocket.

“To think I have spent my life drinking tea. We shall start a wine collection when we get back, Choe. I will have a temperature-controlled cellar.”

“Of course, sir.”

“We had tea the first time we met, didn’t we? We talked until morning.” Makishima stands close to him, murmuring these words close to his ear, and Choe does not know what takes possession of him to say the next thing. He has picked up many of these quotes in the past ten years, in the ocean of books with which they have substituted their own words to each other. One of them simply floats up in his recollection, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Honore de Balzac once said, _Great love affairs start with champagne and end with tisane_."

Makishima pulls away from him and stares, his face small and pale beneath the flush. “We are not that story written backwards,” he says, voice quiet but firm. “We have not come to the end.”

_But were you not thinking it?_ He still feels the pressure of Makishima’s hand on his shoulder, long after the other has left. _Were those same words not running through your head, on this, the last night before we learn the truth, when you poured those drinks and waited for me?_

 

.

 

Inspector Ginoza Nobuchika does not inquire in to the personal lives of others. This is a professional standard of conduct he has meticulously kept, in the hopes that his colleagues will not inquire into his own romantic ventures (futility coefficient over 300). He has many things on his mind today, and rather hopes the meeting will be short. He has not thought, at all, about what day it is.

“Did you know, Inspector, that in the previous century, today was widely regarded as a day for lovers?”

The Chief says this with no warning, no change in tone from the veiled threats she had been making to his career and well-being, his very existence and all the potted plants in it, just moments before. For a moment Gino thinks he has not heard correctly. He takes off his glasses and polishes them carefully, both lenses, just to make sure. “Sibyl has deemed that an unnecessary holiday,” he finally replies.

“Perhaps even Sibyl is not of one mind about it.” The Chief smiles at him. Gino reminds himself, quickly, that it is not good for one’s hue to think of one’s employer in terms such as _creepy_. There is some sort of package on the desk, the size and shape of a book, wrapped in nondescript brown paper. He stares, though he knows he should not be staring. “Never mind,” the Chief says, with a trace of irony. “Go and enjoy being young.”

Something is definitely strange about today, Gino thinks. Back at his office he decides it is a special occasion after all, and gives a particularly thorough watering to his plants.

 

.

 

The water in the pitcher is, for the most part, perfectly still. Only when they hit a patch of turbulence does the fact that they are thousands of feet up in the air make itself known through the slightest of vibrations. The person who is Touma Kouzaburou in all senses but the literal sits behind his desk and watches Makishima through the refractive distortion of water. Makishima appears to be enjoying a completely untroubled unconsciousness. His hair has gotten longer, Touma thinks. He cannot focus on thinking about any one thing, at present. The book is on the desk, neatly wrapped. The phone is in his hand. The screen is cracked, and there is a good deal of dried blood on it. Touma will not admit, if he is asked, that he was not the one who pulled the trigger. It had been a good deal more gratifying to be the one making the decision, passing down the sentence as swiftly as the falling of a guillotine blade.

He will not admit this. He has not felt like himself since the previous day, which is a somewhat strange thing to be thinking under the present circumstances. The water in the pitcher vibrates again; Touma feels a mild annoyance toward it, does not know what it is even there for. He certainly has no need for drinking water, and as for Makishima—why had he not thought to ask for a pot of tea?

He should be happy, he tells himself. Now that the moment he has worked toward for three years has come to pass, and on such a meaningful date, no less. He should be exhilarated, relieved, content at the very least. There is no doubt that between them they will have many things to talk about. But the night before—

Touma stands up anxiously and walks across the room, stands over Makishima while he sleeps. Creepily, he supposes. Watches the display of his vitals on the heart monitor for a while, just to make sure nothing is wrong. “I’d asked you once,” he says finally. “Whether you thought we would do any better than the people in the book you lent me. The one who betrayed his love, who ended up a weeping wreckage hoping for death, who came at last to love Big Brother.”

Makishima gives no response, and momentarily Touma thinks of yanking him upright by the hair. “I’m giving this back to you for another reason,” he says. “I have no need for what it says anymore.” But the last page is imprinted in his mind, in every connection and groove of his neurons, and he cannot stop the words from being traced over and over in his head. “Under the spreading chestnut tree,” Touma recites, but the words come out wrong. “I sold you, but did you sell me?”

The night before he had given the approval to kill Choe Gu-Sung. There had been no hesitation in the act, no remorse even now. But to read someone’s psycho-pass means analyzing them, breaking down their motives and memories and all their little fragmented thoughts into something that could be understood. It was accomplished in an instant. He had not been able to understand Makishima through reading him directly, but somehow, somehow, two months later when he sifted through this nobody’s thoughts, he had been struck with the overwhelming terror that here was a complete translation of the man, in a language that was going to be forever dead to Touma Kouzaborou, all of it flashing by too quickly for him to read.

In a moment he will walk back to the desk and sit down and not drink the water. In a moment he will force these thoughts out of his head. For now he reaches out, his hand hovering above Makishima’s sleeping face, the softness of his hair falling over his bandaged forehead. And this is all. This is the start and the end, Touma thinks, realizes with nothing less than absolute certainty. This is all there is going to be.

 

.

 

There are two things which Makishima Shogo does not believe he will ever do. One is throwing away a book, and another is regretting anything he has ever done. So it is natural that he commits both of these deeds in quick succession, one leading to the other.

The restaurant is open, which surprises him slightly. The city is still on edge, and he can see that the windows have been replaced recently. It is late at night, the air very cold, but it would not do for him to shiver. They have not started searching for him yet, but he has put on a holo-disguise anyway. Another convenient function of the phone he has taken with him, a feat worthy of a genius. Hand withdrawn into his sleeve, he runs his thumb along the cracks in the phone, works them over and over. A meaningless gesture; he is just trying to keep his mind off the cold, the fact that, though to all outward appearances he is a middle-aged man wearing an incredibly puffy jacket, he is in actuality dressed in nothing but a green hospital gown.

He does not remember being seated; it is possible that being struck on the head still has some unpleasant aftereffects, or perhaps it is something else. The waitress greets him cheerfully and makes some small talk about Valentine’s Day. It is an old holiday, and he cannot remember if he and Choe have actually ever observed it, but it amuses him that Sibyl’s disregard for the day has not wiped it from the memories of ordinary citizens. “Are you waiting for someone?” the waitress asks, with a shyly inquisitive smile. Makishima stares over his folded menu at the empty seats in front of him. The booth is meant to seat three—four, really, but when they came here they had been three, young and giddy with the promise of the terrible, warm in the middle of winter. He has not anticipated, in the end, the way things have come apart. But that is no failing. That is part of the humanity he has said he would embrace, that risk is part of the reason they had gravitated toward him. If he admits regret now he is being hypocritical. “I am not,” he says, with equal pleasantness.

They bring him the full set of appetizers with his meal. Makishima has never understood this, why even a single diner requires no less than five or six side dishes that should take at least two people to finish. It is some quirk of the culinary culture of that country. He has meant to ask Choe about it, once or twice. Perhaps— _perhaps, sir, we simply think that one should never have to dine alone._

He does not think he wants to eat, but he finishes the meal anyway. Outside the lights of the city are very bright, the streets filling up with people. It does not take long, even after the most catastrophic of events, for people to desire to carry on as usual. He thinks about the book, momentarily; shredded up in the engines, perhaps, burnt up into nothing. Of the places he has lived and cannot return to. But nothing has changed. He is alive, he is three steps ahead, he just needs to get some clothes, and really nothing has changed. After a while he takes out the phone, tries for a few minutes to wipe it clean. _Why did you get a white cover for your phone, Choe Gu-Sung?_ he had asked once. _White is the hardest color to keep clean._

Choe had replied with his usual indulgent smile, his tone half-serious. _You seem to do it effortlessly, sir, so it should not be so hard._ That had been almost a year ago, too. He remembers clearly and without reason that it had been midafternoon.

The phone is still functional, and it has been painstakingly re-engineered such that it cannot be traced. He brings up the number. The restaurant is largely empty, and he can make the call undisturbed if he so chooses. Choe had gotten him the number some days ago, but he had never dialed it. Had found some reason, unnamed to himself, to keep from doing so. But now there are no more reasons. Every reason has vanished into air and smoke and things never noticed until too late. A few minutes before midnight on a day that holds no special meaning, none at all, Makishima Shogo composes a smile on his face and dials the number.

 

 

 

**Fin**


End file.
